The Hugger Mugger Yoga Blog » Diary of a New Yoga Teacherhttp://www.huggermugger.com/blog
Celebrate The JourneyTue, 03 Mar 2015 18:13:10 +0000en-UShourly1Diary of a New Yoga Teacher: Part 3http://www.huggermugger.com/blog/2012/new-yoga-teacher-part-3/
http://www.huggermugger.com/blog/2012/new-yoga-teacher-part-3/#commentsMon, 19 Mar 2012 17:24:05 +0000http://www.huggermugger.com/blog/?p=2745Diary of a New Yoga Teacher: Part 3

Week Four One person showed up, which could have been my worst nightmare because how can you get a good momentum going with just one other? Yet it turned out to be a dream. She needed yoga at this moment in her life, and I was able to tailor the class to her: no headstands because she was too frazzled, and careful hamstring stretches because of an injury she was

One person showed up, which could have been my worst nightmare because how can you get a good momentum going with just one other? Yet it turned out to be a dream. She needed yoga at this moment in her life, and I was able to tailor the class to her: no headstands because she was too frazzled, and careful hamstring stretches because of an injury she was nursing.

When I felt a little nervous because this person was very experienced with movement, dance and yoga, I breathed into serving this student, feeling my way into this class with my own opening heart, and sending kindness to my scared bits. My breath led me to toss aside a poem I planned to read about finding God in our hearts and instead, talk about opening ourselves and our lives. I read a short Jane Kenyon poem, “Three Times My Life Has Opened,” in which Kenyon speaks of deep loss, great love, and the times our lives open completely. “You will know what I’m talking about, or you will not,” Kenyon writes.

When I finished the poem, this student had tears in her eyes. “Thank you so much,” she said. “That was about my life.”

We went through the rest of the class, unfolding and reaching, strengthening and twisting, opening and listening. At the end, we lay side by side in legs on wall, and breathed together in the noon light of this winter day.

When it was over, the student asked me to see the poem. That’s when she told her she had lost her husband two years before, and was going through a difficult time. Her life was open to the root, and being able to do yoga at this moment helped her remember her branches and blossoms.

Week Five

Today a mother and her 26-year-old son came. The music I brought—I tend to bring a soundtrack combining the usual yoga music suspects (Krishna Das, Deva Premal) along with folk, jazz ballads, world music and an occasional show tune—included the Penguin Cafe Orchestra’s “Music for a Found Harmonium.”

The mother told me after class that she had recorded this song on a cassette when she was pregnant with her son, and played it throughout her pregnancy, even during her labor. To have this song playing while she did yoga with her grown son, a vibrant young man, filled her heart. Hearing this story filled mine too.

]]>http://www.huggermugger.com/blog/2012/new-yoga-teacher-part-3/feed/1Diary of a New Yoga Teacher: Part 2http://www.huggermugger.com/blog/2012/diary-new-yoga-teacher-part-2/
http://www.huggermugger.com/blog/2012/diary-new-yoga-teacher-part-2/#commentsMon, 05 Mar 2012 17:26:50 +0000http://www.huggermugger.com/blog/?p=2742Diary of a New Yoga Teacher: Part 2

Week Three I’ve prepared even more than usual for this week with a special mix tape I created to go along with each stop on the road trip through the class. I have poetry to read at certain intervals, I’m wearing some of my favorite yoga clothes, and I even shaved my legs for no particular reason. I arrive early, light the candles, turn on the fountain, start the music.

Week Three

I’ve prepared even more than usual for this week with a special mix tape I created to go along with each stop on the road trip through the class. I have poetry to read at certain intervals, I’m wearing some of my favorite yoga clothes, and I even shaved my legs for no particular reason. I arrive early, light the candles, turn on the fountain, start the music. I sit in the center of my mat and smile. They will be coming soon, and since last week, I heard—much to my surprise—that both the flexi-flyer and chair lady from last week told another teacher how much they loved my class. If that’s true, how can I go wrong, I ask myself.

It’s five minutes till class starts. Then it’s time. Then it’s past time. I get up, go to the door and look out at the wind-swept, silent and bare parking lot. I go back to my mat. I get up again and check.

Every time I go to the front windows, I’m swept back to my college days, looking out the living room window for hours for various dates who never showed up. I’m not being stood up, I tell myself. This is a class, not a potential romance.

By fifteen minutes into the class, the obvious is clear to me: no one is coming.

There are many roads to ruin I could travel with this information, wondering if it’s me or some twisted karmic fortune cookie from the gods telling me not to teach yoga. But my mind, thankfully, skips to the chase: this is a new center, I’m a new teacher, and things like this as bound to happen, nothing personal, just the way of the unpredictable world. Besides, it’s not like my students are out with another yoga teacher behind my back (or are they?).

So I turn up the music and start warming up, first with some standing stretches, and then, without thinking about it, a little dancing on my mat. I turn up the music louder—a fast-paced Celtic song that I always loved—and before I know it, I’m off the mat and dancing like a fool. I jump, run, turn fast, sway my hips and shake my shoulders. I’ve got this wide expanse of beautiful bamboo floor unfolding around me, and a whole lot of time.

Right in the middle of the next faux-pirouette, I spy a woman standing in the door frame. I scream, freeze, make myself smile, and greet her. Turns out she’s not late for my class but almost a day early for another class.

]]>http://www.huggermugger.com/blog/2012/diary-new-yoga-teacher-part-2/feed/0Diary of a New Yoga Teacher: Part 1http://www.huggermugger.com/blog/2012/diary-new-yoga-teacher/
http://www.huggermugger.com/blog/2012/diary-new-yoga-teacher/#commentsTue, 21 Feb 2012 18:16:19 +0000http://www.huggermugger.com/blog/?p=2738Diary of a New Yoga Teacher: Part 1

Week One Three people come, and I’m deeply grateful. This is a fairly new yoga studio on the western edge of town, a place where no yoga studios have yet ventured. We’re in a location where we’re both greatly needed and greatly not expected (translation: invisible despite our lovely sign, postcards here and yonder, and tweets about town). When I went to my first teacher meeting, I asked the other

Week One

Three people come, and I’m deeply grateful. This is a fairly new yoga studio on the western edge of town, a place where no yoga studios have yet ventured. We’re in a location where we’re both greatly needed and greatly not expected (translation: invisible despite our lovely sign, postcards here and yonder, and tweets about town).

When I went to my first teacher meeting, I asked the other teachers how many students I could expect.

“Sometimes five,” one woman said hopefully.

“Sometimes zero,” a few others chimed in.

So today I was happy to have three. Granted, I had especially asked (cajoled, invited, begged) two out of the three to come, but it was good to have real bodies on real mats. My students were a small but diverse crew: an older woman with decades of experience doing yoga, a middle-aged woman just dipping her toes into the yogini waters, and a young man who just said he was too stressed out lately.

As we started, I glanced at my notes, a palette of possibilities and certainly far too ambitious to cover without being here until 2013. It suddenly seemed impossible to transform my ideas for this class into something coherent that would speak to this small group. I looked at my students, sitting quietly after some warm-up stretches. “What do you need today?” I asked.

“Kick my ass,” said one.

“Push me,” said another.

“Please,” added a third.

To my surprise, they were already speaking from a group mind, or it was just a lucky coincidence. I smiled, got them to their feet, and we began a long journey through sun salutations with lots of plug-ins added (cat-cow, thread the needle and chair, for instance). By the time they were rolling their mats up, they were exuberant. “Just what I needed,” they chimed together.

As I unplugged the fountain and turned off the lights, I told myself this was surely the start of my yoga teaching genius. Why next week, I would have 10 students, each class a delight and a cinch.

Class Two

Today I had a flexi-flyer, someone who could probably touch her nose to her toes without much warm-up. I’m not a flexi-flyer. A 52-year-old woman who started yoga later in life, I have some of the tightest hamstrings in Kansas, and persist in a love-hate relationship with everything from downward dog to child’s pose. There’s simply no way for me to demonstrate for a flexi-flyer how she might engage with her edge.

The other student was an older woman who had never done yoga before and didn’t realize she had to get up and down from a mat. She’s game for trying, but being over 60 and somewhat out of shape, she needs a chair, so I bring her one and place it in the center of her mat.

The class turns into me racing from flexi-flyer to chair lady, talking them through modifications as best I can. In Dandasana (Staff Pose), I get chair lady another chair for her legs, and encourage her to lean forward just a few inches, keeping her heart open. For flexi-flyer, who just about has her nose on her knees, I suggest softening her heart because I can’t think of what else to say. I used to make jokes about moments like this, telling my students, “Now if you can go much further than I can with this pose, please do. I promise not to be offended.” But I soon realized no one laughed at these jokes, and even more so, I didn’t need to apologize by way of joke for being shaped in such a way that it takes me an inordinate amount of time to find yoga pants that don’t make my legs appear to lead up to a big black sink.

When it’s time for Svasana (Corpse Pose), chair lady decides she wants to lie down on the mat after all, so I help her bend slowly without putting pressure on her knees, which she tells me will be replaced soon. I use a lot of blankets to support her head and her knees.

Throughout the class, these two have operated as if they were different species parallel-playing, and by the time class is done, neither seems like they had a particularly good time. “This was interesting,” chair lady says, “but I feel stupid that I can’t do more.” I try to reassure her that there’s yoga for everybody, and also add that I’m sorry I didn’t know more modifications to show her. Flexi-flyer is out the door so fast I don’t imagine she’ll ever be back.

Driving home, I wonder if that call I answered to become a yoga teacher was actually just a wrong number.